California details plans to reduce prison crowding

Gov. Jerry Brown files plan late Thursday

California will seek to reduce inmates' sentences while increasing its use of private prisons to meet a court-ordered population cap by the end of the year, under a plan Gov. Jerry Brown filed late Thursday.

The plan calls for increasing early release credits for inmates and freeing elderly and incapacitated prisoners, while slowing the return of thousands of inmates who are being held in private prisons in other states.

The Democratic governor intends to seek a delay of those steps while he appeals the ruling on overcrowding, which already has been upheld once by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The state already is sentencing thousands of lower-level offenders to county jails instead of prison, and Brown argues that he can't do more without endangering public safety.

California needs to shed another 9,300 state inmates after the judges ruled that greatly reducing the prison population is the most effective way to improve medical and mental health care for inmates. Current treatment has been ruled unconstitutional.

Options in the state's plan include:

- Granting more early release or "good time" credits to inmates, including second-strike inmates who have serious prior convictions.

- Releasing elderly and medically incapacitated inmates who are deemed unlikely to commit new crimes.

- Increasing the use of drug treatment centers.

- Paying to house more inmates at private prisons within California.

- Slowing the return of the 8,400 inmates who are being housed in private prisons in three other states at an annual cost of about $300 million.

- Adding space for 1,700 sick and mentally ill inmates when a new $1 billion treatment facility opens in Stockton this summer.

- Freeing a projected 900 inmates because voters in November softened the state's tough three-strikes lifetime sentencing law for career criminals. Proposition 36 changed the law to require that the third strike be a violent or serious felony and lets third-strikers with lesser offenses apply for shorter sentences. The administration argued against a proposal to release about 2,800 eligible inmates without a court hearing.

The administration argued against many of the proposals even as it presented the options to the court in a series of legal filings.